PRACTICAL SENSITIVITY IN FOLK KNOWLEDGE ATTRIBUTION: GENERALIZED CONTEXTUALISM

Empirical studies in experimental epistemology show that folk knowledge attribution is influenced by practical factors such as morality, aesthetics, and interests. Through the iterative design of the Knobe cases, it is demonstrated that side-effect of an action can affect the result of knowledge attribution. Specifically, evaluators believe that epistemic agents know the consequences of harmful actions but not the consequences of beneficial actions. Even agents without justification and true belief or in Getterized scenario, people still believe that S knows p. However, mainstream epistemologists maintain that whether an epistemic agent knows p is independent of the nature of the event, the content of belief, and their expectations. To reconcile the conflict between practical factors and intellectualism, this paper is further argued that the consideration of practical factors triggers the assessor's evaluative attitude towards proposition p, affecting the assessor's judgment on the strength of the agent's epistemic state, and thus indirectly affects the truth value of the knowledge attribution sentence.